


Secrets Learned in Shinobi Households

by YinNocturne



Series: Naruto verse world building [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Mentions of canon typical violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-24 22:56:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16184933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YinNocturne/pseuds/YinNocturne
Summary: The divide between civilian children at the Shinobi Academy, and their ‘clan’ classmates.





	Secrets Learned in Shinobi Households

There has always been a certain amount of  _ tension _ between the children from civilian families, and those from shinobi clans. Each Academy class is different but in all of them, with only a very few exceptions, the ‘clan’ kids will group together and so will the ‘civvies’. Interaction between the two groups holds an undercurrent of disdain; but most shinobi cannot pin down why. Civilian raised shinobi and their parents cite clan prejudice, early training and nepotism. 

The truth is far simpler and sadder than that. 

To civilians, shinobi are a peculiar amalgamation of superheroes, guardian spirits, monsters hidden under the bed and bogeymen. There is enough of an understanding that shinobi serve and protect the village to offer them a modicum of respect and a general blind eye to their more eccentric quirks. But not enough to have confronted and accepted the ‘dirty’ parts, the things kept from civilian notice because, well that is for shinobi not innocent civvies who cannot grasp the concept of flexible morality. Thus, civilian kids go to the Academy without having confronted the grim realities of life as an active duty nin. Their sparkling eyes and gleeful chattering about heroes and glory is distasteful on a base level to the children of shinobi families. They have their own heroes, their own dreams of glory, but they also carry with them the memories.

Of Auntie pulling a kunai from her sleeve when she’s startled. Of mother always being awake in the middle of the night. Of cousin guarding their door at night. Of big sister shadowing them to the market, to the park, to their friends houses. They catch glimpses, fragments of conversations, they see the scars and the still healing wounds. 

They each have a set of familiar and strangely comforting funeral blacks in their wardrobes. Shinobi children don’t go to the Academy fully cognisant of what it means to be a shinobi, but they know enough. They have seen enough of the edges to know it isn’t a game, to know the stakes are higher than in any other profession. To know the price of failure. And in the face of that, the eyes of innocent unenlightened civilian children are annoying - another thing to work around. It becomes a point of difference from which divisionary lines are drawn.

So many civilian children drop out of the Shinobi Education Program - after their first year at the Academy; after failing to graduate or pass their genin sensei’s test; after their first D-rank mission; after their first mission outside the village. Less than half of the civilian children who enrol in the Academy reach the final culling point: the Chuunin Exams. Civilian raised shinobi who make it through the Chuunin Exams are no longer ‘civilian raised’, they are ‘first generation shinobi’. They have stared into the abyss, looked into the maw of the monster, and held fast, raised their kunai, their chakra, their bodies in defiant protest.


End file.
